Set up by Tony Burke, an artist and filmmaker, he invited people to post photographs of women eating on the subway, snapped without their notice.

Visitors were also invited to comment — reportedly, these have focused on the women’s appearance and have been generally misogynistic and laddish.

Many women and not a few men find this creepy and sexist. Why, for example, are men not included? What about privacy?

And how do Mr. Burke’s actions differ from those of the (presumably) adolescent males who set up a website to grade the sex appeal of female students at a Toronto-area Roman Catholic school?

Lucy Brisbane McKay, a student at Goldsmith’s College in London who helped organize Monday’s eat-in, said she did it to support women who might feel intimidated.

“This is about turning it around and getting the power and putting the joke on the lads posting on the page,” she told The Daily Telegraph.

“I thought the best way to beat it was to take it back to basics and say whether you find it funny or not, you can’t argue that women who get on the Tube feel intimidated to eat on the Tube, directly because of the page and that’s a problem and no one can argue that.”

Mr. Burke’s group, which was set up in 2011, came to public attention last week.

Sophie Wilkinson, a journalist with The Independent newspaper, wrote a piece describing how she felt “hurt and humiliated” after her picture ended up on the Facebook page.

“I’d like to know the name of her finishing school,” read a comment under her image.

“I was the butt of a joke without my knowledge, in front of thousands of strangers. I’d been ‘stranger-shamed’” she said.

For his part, Mr. Burke is attempting to cloak his project in the respectability of “high art.” It’s not stranger-shaming; it’s the London equivalent of wildlife photography, he claims.

“At its truest form, it should cherish its subjects in the way a wildlife photographer cherishes a kingfisher in a river,” he said.

Mr. Burke says he was travelling on the Tube when he noticed there were more women eating while travelling than men.

His “creative brain” started buzzing, and so he surreptitiously snapped a few pictures and posted them on Facebook. His friends received them well, so he decided to create a group specifically for the pictures.

He chose to make it all-women based because he needed a niche.

“If it was called ‘people who eat on Tubes’, it wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “I thought I might as well call it something, so I called it women eating on the Tube. It was what it is and it’s utterly pointless.”

Facebook has now closed the page to outsiders. At last count, the group had more than 24,000 participants.

Writing for the webzine Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams argued the photos were little more than voyeurism.